Abstract
Cosmopolitanism, as it is being theorized today, is “inevitably drawn to a discussion of ‘modernity.’” Beginning with Renaissance exploration and colonization and extending through modern nationalisms, diasporas, and global capitalism, “coming to modernity” has become the starting point for a cosmopolitanism that focuses its ethics on cultural pluralism, non-Western subjects, and antinationalist theories of world government, citizenship, and politics.3 In a world made up of “diverse transnational forms of life,” global capitalism, and “hybrid self-consciousness” borne of diasporic communities, the world of the national, provincial, and local serves as the retrograde, premodern antithesis of the cosmopolitan.4 The goal of most modern cosmopolitanisms, therefore, is formulated in terms of an ethics of world-citizenship based on a recognition of human dignity and cultural hybridity, a commitment to justice, and a sense of belonging to a universal community beyond national boundaries.5 Although cosmopolitan theorists such as Kwame Anthony Appiah argue for a “rooted cosmopolitanism” that includes the “smaller scale” communities in which we all live—counties, towns, streets, business, crafts, professions, and families—the impetus of cosmopolitan theory lies in its critique of the nation and nationalisms both secular and religious and its dedication to an expanded sphere of awareness and ethical engagement befitting world citizenship.
William Langland’s Piers Plowman, often thought of as a complaint against the disarray of late medieval English society to be addressed through communal cooperation, imagines a mobile cosmopolitanism in the allegorical figure of Conscience. Piers Plowman generates a cosmopolitanism that does not depend on the discourse of modernity.
As a historical category, the cosmopolitan should be considered entirely open, and not pregiven or foreclosed by the definition of any particular society or discourse. Its various embodiments, including past embodiments, await discovery and explication.
—Sheldon Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms”1
Individuals who are brothers to each other, and all the more so collective bodies and communities, are moreover bound to help each other towards these goals [of peace and tranquility], from feelings of heavenly charity as much as the bond or right of human society.
—Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace 2
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Notes
Sheldon Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 577–78.
Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace, ed. and trans. Annabel Brett, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), I.1.iv, p. 6.
Timothy Brennan, “Cosmo-Theory,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001): 674. Brennan critiques what he terms “cosmo-theory” for its failure to acknowledge the coercive nature of diasporic modernity celebrated in some cosmopolitanisms.
Most cosmopolitan theory recognizes the interlocking concentric circles of a person’s affiliations, but in the interest of opposing nationalist identifications, they tend to emphasize the international and global. See Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country? ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), pp. 3–17; Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, pp. 1–14;
Vinay Dharwadker, “Introduction: Cosmopolitanism in Its Time and Place,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–13;
and Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms,” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 580–89.
See Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace, ed. and trans. Annabel Brett, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), I.4.v.21. For an overview of Marsilius of Padua’s political philosophy, particularly as it derives from Ciceronian principles,
see Cary J. Nederman, “Nature, Justice, and Duty in the Defensor Pacis: Marsiglio of Padua’s Ciceronian Impulse,” Political Theory 18.4 (1990): 615–37.
Morton W. Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961), pp. 168–69;
Mary C. Schroeder (Carruthers), “The Character of Conscience in Piers Plowman,” Studies in Philology 67.1 (1970): 13–30;
Russell A. Peck, “Social Conscience and the Poets,” in Social Unrest in the Middle Ages: Papers of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Francis X. Newman (Binghamton, NY: CEMERS, 1986), pp. 113–48.
All quotations of Piers Plowman are from the B-text. William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A.V C. Schmidt (London: Everyman, 1978), 1. 6. All citations will appear in the text hereafter. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
Emily Steiner, “Piers Plowman, Diversity, and the Medieval Political Aesthetic,” Representations 91.1 (Summer 2005): 15 and 14, respectively.
See Martha C. Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 5.1 (1997): 1–25; Nederman, “Nature, Justice, and Duty in the Defensor Pacis,” 615–37,
and Nederman, “Community and Self-interest,” Review of Politics 58.2 (2003): 395–416.
For a discussion of Dante’s theory of world government, see Derek Heater, World Citizenship and Government: Cosmopolitan Ideas in the History of Western Political Thought (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 37–47. John Ganim includes Marsilius of Padua and Dante in his overview of medieval cosmopolitanism, “Cosmopolitan Chaucer, or The Uses of Local Culture,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 5 and “Cosmopolitanism and Medievalism,” Exemplaria 22.1 (2010): 13.
Cicero, On Duties, ed. and trans. M.T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), I.12, p. 6 and I.20, p. 9.
Dante Alighieri, Monarchy I.11, ed. and trans. Prue Shaw, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 18.
Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace” in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, ed. Pauline Kleingeld, trans. David L. Colclasure (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 67–109. For the Stoic elements of Kant’s cosmopolitanism, see Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” 1–25.
Gerald Morgan makes a similar point about the expanded social function of Kind Wit in the poem, “The Meaning of Kind Wit, Conscience, and Reason in the First Vision of Piers Plowman,” Modern Philology 84.4 (1987): 351–52. Scholars have mistakenly, I think, taken a narrow view of Kind Wit as a “purely natural mental” faculty that, although it is shared by human beings, does not function collectively, as I am suggesting here. Hugh White also maintains that Kind Wit “is at least intimately involved in, if not actually responsible for, the institution of an ideal society in which love flourishes,” Nature and Salvation in Piers Plowman (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1988), p. 19. See Randolph Quirk, “Langland’s Use of Kynde Wit and Inwit,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 52 (1953): 184–85; Schroeder, “Character of Conscience,” 21;
and Britton J. Harwood, “Kynde Wit,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 75.3 (1976): 330–36.
Anna P. Baldwin, The Theme of Government in Piers Plowman (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1981), p. 24.
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© 2013 John M. Ganim and Shayne Aaron Legassie
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Lochrie, K. (2013). Inventing Social Conscience: Cosmopolitanism in Piers Plowman . In: Ganim, J.M., Legassie, S.A. (eds) Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137045096_8
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